Sharon Pickering

Monash University (Australia) · School of Social Science

While states around the world have responded to mass mobility by increasing border policing, our knowledge of the daily reality of that form of policing remains limited. How migrant women are policed has been particularly neglected. The political and practical difficulty of examining the context, process and experience of border control practices a...

This paper presents major findings of a project focused on the experiences of Rohingya women in Malaysia, categorised as ‘irregular migrants’. Malaysia has become a key destination and country of transit for many Rohingya fleeing Myanmar. The paper presents and analyses the influences on decision-making; the role of family; information sources used...

Human trafficking and modern slavery have captured the imagination and attention of the international community. This book builds on the authors’ first volume, Sex Trafficking: International context and response. Much has changed since the first volume was published, not least the shift away from sex trafficking to modern slavery as the dominant fo...

In a contemporary setting of increasing social division and marginalisation, Policing Hate Crime interrogates the complexities of prejudice motivated crime and effective policing practices. Hate crime has become a barometer for contemporary police relations with vulnerable and marginalised communities. But how do police effectively lead conversatio...

Despite sustained media and political interest in Greece as a key site of European border security, there is little academic scholarship about daily life in Greek detention centres. In this article we start to fill this gap, drawing on fieldwork conducted in Athens’ Central Holding Centre for immigrants, Petrou Ralli, in 2012. This chapter also con...

The traditional Polynesian skill of navigating long sea journeys is legendary. From a Polynesian perspective, the precolonial Pacific was a ‘sea of islands’ within which people moved freely and maintained active social links and trading networks (Lee 2009, citing Hau’ofa 1993a). In effect, the ocean served to connect, rather than divide, the region...

This chapter introduces the key conceptual framework of the book and sets out the problems faced by temporary migrants in Australia that were revealed through the case studies carried out during the course of our research. We consider contemporary migration patterns at both a global and regional level (in the Asia-Pacific region) with reference to...

In order to understand the everyday lives and survival strategies of individuals and families with either regular or irregular migration status in Australia, and to identify the various forms of social isolation and exclusion faced by temporary migrants, our research employed a mixed-method approach as its overarching framework (Merton 2009; Creswe...

In this chapter we use data from all four case studies to discuss the processes that drive mobility between Australia and the case study countries, focusing on factors that relate to the search for human security. The findings are initially presented separately for each case study, and then general themes are drawn together in the conclusion.

Temporary migration in its many forms is one of the new challenges of the twenty-first century. The conditions of globalisation unsettle orthodox conceptions of migration and border control, as migrants increasingly operate through transnational networks in which identities and loyalties to nations are more fluid than when people migrate for life (...

China’s rapid development over the past 30 years has underpinned its emergence not only as a key player in the globalised world but arguably also as the engine room of globalisation in regard to the mobility of goods, services and people. Central to China’s development and globalisation has been the pipeline of Chinese national students exported in...

Large-scale emigrations do not occur in a vacuum but are related to the social and political contexts of the individuals who leave their country of origin for short or long periods. A decade and a half ago, Indonesia was in the grip of political upheaval and economic crisis that manifested as interreligious violence and social instability in many p...

In this chapter we combine the research data from all four case studies to consider the processes that facilitate or hinder temporary migration into Australia and the capacity to stay. The chapter will provide rich qualitative data on the impact of Australian immigration policies on mobile populations and the roles played by a range of actors and b...

Migrant transnationalism has dominated the Tongan national experience since the 1960s, when the Pacific Islanders’ long history of interisland mobility transformed to become a form of mobility more closely tied to the nation-state and the pursuit of individual, familial and national survival and prosperity (see Pyke et al. 2012). An important featu...

In this chapter we focus on the themes that emerged from our interviews with mobile communities about their experiences after arrival in Australia, particularly processes of reception and inclusion. The findings are initially discussed within each of the case studies. The chapter concludes with an overview that identifies common themes and contrast...

This book explores the experiences of temporary migrants in the Asia-Pacific region. It develops the original concept of 'fluid security' to analyse the way in which persons carry a set of tools, strategies and attitudes across spatial, temporal and imagined borders. This concept applies a mobilities lens to human security in order to take into acc...

The Australian Institute of Criminology (‘AIC’) is the Australian Government's designated monitoring body responsible for reporting on deaths in custody in Australia under the National Deaths in Custody Program (‘NDICP’). Although the Border Crossing Observatory¹ has recorded the deaths of 77 persons in Australian immigration custody since 2000, th...

The Routledge Handbook on Crime and International Migration is concerned with the various relationships between migration, crime and victimization that have informed a wide criminological scholarship often driven by some of the original lines of inquiry of the Chicago School. Historically, migration and crime came to be the device by which Criminol...

http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/thebordercrossingobservatory/files/2015/07/113_CICJ_27_1_Powell-et-al_Final-.pdf

As the Global North experiences a real or manufactured crisis in asylum, deterrence has become the central plank in border control policies. Following a resurgence of boat arrivals and faced with serious overcrowding in detention centers and a spate of drownings, the Australian government returned to the use of offshore detention for asylum seekers...

To examine the micro politics of new carceral spaces this article considers the very human(e) interactions that occur in an increasingly depersonalized, technologically remote-driven space: the border. This interrogation is also specifically interested in the enactment of gender at the border in relation to the increasing numbers of women making ir...

Australia has attracted a dubious international reputation over the last decade for its harsh policies towards asylum seekers and has become a world leader in border externalisation practices aimed at preventing their arrival. At the same time, Australian governments have also historically shown a preparedness to use their internal enforcement powe...

The role of borders in managing sex work is a valuable site for analysing the relationship between criminal justice and migration administration functions. For the purposes of this article, we are concerned with how generalized concerns around trafficking manifest in specific interactions between immigration officials and women travellers. To this...

Trafficking in people has been at the forefront of international, regional and bilateral intervention in the global north for over two decades. During this time, the issue has been profoundly explored, researched, theorised and analysed (for an extensive literature review, see Segrave et al 2009; Lee 2011; Schauer and Wheaton 2006). The body of lit...

Since 2000, more than 1,500 people have died trying to reach Australia by boat or in other ways that are connected with the enforcement of border controls. This article is concerned with a subset of those deaths that can be classified as deaths in immigration custody. In the Australian context, official deaths in custody reporting has only included...

European Union (EU) Member States have cultivated the ‘securitization of migration’, crafting a legal framework that prevents irregular migrants, including asylum seekers, from arriving in the EU. As external and internal border controls are reinvigorated to achieve this aim, the experiences of asylum seekers beyond the EU border, in designated ‘tr...

Over the past decade, the border and border policing has figured as central to identifying and responding to trafficking. This article draws on original research into immigration officers' decision-making — both at the border and within the nation — to identify the persistent preoccupation with suspect travellers. Examining research in Australia an...

In a global era of increased securitization of migration between the developed and developing world this article undertakes a gendered analysis of the ways women die irregularly crossing borders. Through an examination of datasets in Europe, the USA and Australia it finds women are more likely to die crossing borders at the harsh physical frontiers...

In this article we draw on fieldwork conducted in Athen’s Central Holding Centre for immigrants, Petrou Ralli, in 2012. Using testimonies from detainees and the staff who work with them we unveil the human impact of policies being implemented in response to transnational pressures from Brussels and to more local problems. What are women’s needs in...

Sex work has always attracted policy, public and prurient interest. Currently, legal frameworks in developed countries range from prohibition, through partial legalisation to active regulation. Globalisation has increased women’s mobility between developing and developed countries at the same time as women’s employment opportunities in the develope...

Trafficking in persons, particularly the trafficking of women into sexual servitude (sex trafficking) has generated much attention over the past decade. This book provides a critical examination of the international and national frameworks developed to respond to this issue - focused both on the design of policy responses and their implementation....

We present findings from a study of sex workers recruited in indoor licensed premises in Victoria. While the study addressed regulation, enforcement and working conditions, we focus on the value of flexible well-paid work for two particular groups of female workers (parents and students). We link this issue of flexibility to broader gendered employ...

Despite continuing contests in Australian states over the validity of sex work as work, Victoria and New South Wales (NSW) have been part of a global trend for states to decriminalise and/or legalise the sex industry. This article argues that although Victoria and NSW are united by their ambivalence toward the legal validity of sex work as work for...

This article looks at Somali women’s experiences of extra-legal border crossing of the European Union’s southern border. Based on qualitative interviews with women who have travelled irregularly to Malta, and key state and non-government organization stakeholders, this article considers the layers of exile and vulnerability engendered by Malta’s at...

Homicide law reform surrounding the partial defences to murder currently animates legal stakeholders in Australia and the United Kingdom, particularly in relation to cases of lethal intimate partner violence. In 2005, the Victorian Government implemented a series of homicide law reforms, central to which was the abolition of the partial defence of...

The collection considers the growing importance of the border as a prime site for state activity and the impact of such activity on human rights and global justice. It explores how state activity on the border simultaneously creates and responds to crime, criminalizing individuals who irregularly cross borders while ignoring far more harmful cross...

Controlling border crossing has become an urgent concern under conditions of globalization, leading Western governments to introduce increasingly coercive control measures. Far from eradicating spontaneous border crossing, this defensive geography has fuelled illicit people-smuggling markets, and forced asylum seekers and illegalized travellers int...

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For every dead body washed up on the shores of the developed world, experts estimate there are at least two others that are never recovered. Nearly 14,000 people are known to have died between 1993 and 2010 trying to enter Europe, or while in detention or during forcible deportation. Across the three key border zones between the Global North and Gl...

Individual borders have their own specific histories, and the policies designed to defend them are shaped by local as well as global factors. As Pratt (2005, p. 185) reminds us: ‘The border is an ongoing accomplishment, yet the processes by which it is continually produced are erased by its apparent self-evidence.’ Constituting borders through geog...

Nikolas Rose has argued that numbers make late modern modes of governance both possible and judgeable (Rose, 1999). According to Andreas and Greenhill (2010) we live in a ‘hyper-numeric’ world in which something counts because it can be counted. On the one hand, quantification can transform the political domain into a docile arena where the ‘appare...

In this chapter we discuss instances where illegalized border crossers are believed to have died directly at the hands of others, including state agents, private contractors working for the state, people smugglers, border vigilantes and other private individuals. Although the chains of responsibility leading to these deaths may be more clearly disc...

The passage from Roberts cited above encompasses within an ‘expanded definition of violence’ a broad range of harmful actions which may be either intended or unintended, and can be perpetrated through either direct or indirect means, by individuals or institutions. Structural violence is characterized primarily by the absence of visible actors and...

Although they are closeted from many of the harmful consequences of contemporary border controls, populations of the Global North are occasionally confronted with the violent deaths of illegalized border crossers. Sometimes the grim reality is experienced first-hand when unidentified bodies wash up among holidaymakers on Mediterranean beaches, or w...

The above quote is not depicting a situation in a country experiencing war or conflict, or a region plagued by poverty or civil upheaval. Rather, it is describing the conditions inside immigration detention centres in Australia in 2003. If detention and deportation are the bodily sanctions imposed by the current migration regime (Khosravi, 2010), t...

Yaguine Koita and Fodė Tounkara did not have the opportunity to present their polite request to European leaders. Their terrible deaths illustrate in dramatic fashion the structural violence that prevents large populations from the Global South from ‘realizing their actual potential’. The violence of borders is most immediately apparent in the boys...

We argued in the previous chapter that the process of counting border-related deaths is an inherently political act which makes (implicit or explicit) political claims about the border that align most closely with established accounts of border enforcement. This chapter considers the possibilities of developing a richer picture of death at the bord...

The Haneef case focused Australian and international attention on the operation of counter-terrorism policing. This article identifies key aspects of the broader federal police approach to counter-terrorism policing used in the Haneef investigation and specifically focuses on the role of ‘perceptual interventions’ made by the Australian Federal Pol...

The Haneef case focused Australian and international attention on the operation of counter-terrorism policing. This article identifies key aspects of the broader federal police approach to counter-terrorism policing used in the Haneef investigation and specifically focuses on the role of ‘perceptual interventions’ made by the Australian Federal Pol...

Women, Borders, and Violence analyzes border policing practices currently informed by paradigms of securitization against unauthorized mobility and explores the potential for a paradigm shift to a more ethical regulation of borders. By focusing on the ways women have sought to cross borders in ‘extra’-legal fashion, the book shows how border enforc...

This article overviews a large, 3-year study conducted by Monash University and Victoria Police on Counter-Terrorism Policing and Culturally Diverse Communities. It sets out the development of a social cohesion approach to counter-terrorism policing based on extensive empirical research with police members, culturally diverse communities and throug...

This article looks at pre-crime in the context of counter-terrorism. Pre-crime links coercive state actions to suspicion without the need for charge, prosecution or conviction. It also includes measures that expand the remit of the criminal law to include activities or associations that are deemed to precede the substantive offence targeted for pre...

This article looks at pre-crime in the context of counter-terrorism. Pre-crime links coercive state actions to suspicion without the need for charge, prosecution or conviction. It also includes measures that expand the remit of the criminal law to include activities or associations that are deemed to precede the substantive offence targeted for pre...

This article overviews a large, 3-year study conducted by Monash University and Victoria Police on Counter-Terrorism Policing and Culturally Diverse Communities. It sets out the development of a social cohesion approach to counter-terrorism policing based on extensive empirical research with police members, culturally diverse communities and throug...

The staging of the 2006 Federation of International Football Association (FIFA) World Cup brought together a wide ranging coalition of interests in fuelling a moral panic around sex trafficking in Europe. This coalition of diverse groups aimed to protect innocent third world women and prevent organized crime networks from luring them into the sex i...